TREND forecast
While Clinton and Trump swap leads in a season of volatile polls, we maintain our forecast that absent a wildcard event or his self-imposed destruction, Trump, a proven reality-show champion, will win the White House. Despite the wedge issues of gender, race and creed that grab headlines… the bottom line among voters in the coming election is… the bottom line.
As we wrote in the Spring Trends Journal, “By dealing herself into Trump’s hand by doubling down on the “woman card,” Clinton, while reinforcing support among her core base, has, in effect, abandoned the famous slogan and centerpiece strategy of her husband Bill’s 1992 race for the White House: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
It was the economy, stupid, back then, and it is the economy, stupid, now. With some 95 percent of the wealth of the nation having gone to the 1 percent since 2009, the low-paying job creation that has over 50 percent of Americans earning under $30,000 a year, with median household income down 7 percent since 2000… Trump, with his calls for sharply higher tariffs, particularly on China, renegotiating NAFTA (a Bill Clinton hallmark), and promising to return jobs lost overseas back to America, his message is playing loudly to a swelling populist movement spreading across America. It is estimated, for example, that since 1999 and 2011, 2.4 million American jobs in manufacturing and service were lost to China.
And, with Trump trumpeting his “Crooked Hillary” chant, associating her, husband Bill and the Clinton Foundation with pay-for-play deals that enriched them, a Pew Research Center poll shows 61 percent of Trump supporters and 91 percent of Bernie Sanders supporters see the system rigged.
While polls will fluctuate and general interest will wane through the summer months, unlike any election in modern American history — even greater than the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates — we forecast that the race will be won or lost when the two candidates face off in the main event: The Presidential Reality Show® debates. This made-for-TV spectacle featuring two of the most untrustworthy, highly disliked candidates in American history, we forecast, will be the highest rated, most widely viewed TV show in history.
Publisher’s Note: While Obama keeps spouting off that the presidential race is not a reality show, speaking out of both sides of his mouth, that’s precisely what he called it.
Go back to February 2007 when candidate Obama, addressing the Democratic National Committee, said: “If you look at all the cameras gathered around and the clicking of the photographers, and the pundits who are collected, you know, sometimes you feel like you’re part of a reality TV show. You know, you feel like this is American Idol or Survivor. You’re trying to figure out, are you going to go to Hollywood? Are you going to be voted off the island?”
In fact, while the Trends Research Institute owns The Presidential Reality Show® trademark, we coined the term in 2008 when Obama, who, lagging behind frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the early polls, rose to stardom after Oprah Winfrey jumped in to support him, kicking his campaign into high gear. Whether a stadium spectacle or small-town meeting, with the Queen of TV in his corner, every Obama campaign event was staged to perfection.
On a personal note, having appeared many times on all the major network TV news and morning shows, and as Oprah Winfrey’s guest twice, I witnessed firsthand how far superior her Harpo Productions were than any of the networks’. As I saw it, it was more than celebrity witchcraft that endears Oprah to her millions of dedicated fans. It’s also stagecraft.
Publisher’s Note: Imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower, five-star general and Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces during World War II, and two-term President of The United States of America, making such a low-brow statement, as President Obama did, that “Beyoncé runs the world.”
Beyoncé does not run my world. I am an American. Barack Obama does not speak for me; he clearly speaks to the entertainment world that sold his two-bit lies of “Hope and Change You Can Believe In” to the American public and most of the world. By Obama’s documented deeds during nearly eight years of office, he speaks as a traitor to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the s0ul of America.
We are political atheists and support no political party or any of the contestants running in The Presidential Reality Show®.